"Escape From New York" is an early 80's science-fiction action thriller- well actually it fits most of the generic conventions of a western film except with a futuristic setting. The film is set in the distant future, at a rough date 1997. New York City has been cordoned off and transformed into a high security prison to accomodate a rapidly growing criminal population.

Meanwhile international affairs are just as volatile and the President (Donald Pleasance) is sent to negotiate peace talks with the Russians and Chinese. En route, the President's Air Force One plane is forced to crash land in New York due to being hijacked by terrorists. The president is the only survivor and it isn't long before the local prisoners have him as their hostage and are torturing him, and holding him for ransom.

The prison chief Hauk decides to employ the help of an ex-marine turned criminal- Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) to go into New York and become the only prisoner allowed out again as long as he rescues the president. Snake is ambivolent, but Hauk manages to co-erce Snake's co-operation, and then sends him in. Snake has to manipulate his way through the criminal society's hierarchy whilst fighting for survival against the most savage murderers and psychopaths, and he only has 24 hours in which to do so.

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I've been to New York, and I must admit to being fond of the city's character and geography. Sure it wasn't as pretty as Los Angeles, but I liked its careful layout of streets and how each main street was numbered, which was mind bogglingly useful when I found myself lost one night, separated from my travelling companion (this was always happening on each holiday we went on) and having to retrace my path back to the Best Western Hotel, whilst avoiding various gangs. Naturally I thought of this film during the experience.

Escape from New York is basically a live action computer game. You have an exaggerately grisly macho man with muscles, ape-like hair and an eye patch traversing city streets, taking on mutant street gangs with an unlimited supply of bullets, and a right hook guaranteed to knock any opponent unconscious with one punch. Indeed most of the sequences of the film seem like a platform level for a computer game. It's basically a very two dimensional film.

Kurt Russell plays Snake as a psychotically agaraphobic anti-hero. He just seems born to play those types of roles. He's perpetually unsmiling and manages to deliver every line as a perfect hiss. Typically he's also a disillusioned war veteran and one of those folk hero criminals who committed the perfect robbery where no-one got hurt, but the system got a well deserved shafting. The first scene between him and the determined special guard commander Hauk (Lee Van Cleff) is a gem. Hauk has to persuade Snake to do the decent thing and help them recover the President, since the only agent they can send in is another prisoner, but Snake is being sarky and uncooperative.

Hauk: "I need an answer."

Snake: "Get a new President!"

So to ensure Snake's co-operation, Hauk has him injected with microscopic explosives which will only be disarmed when Snake comes back with the president, otherwise they will explode when the 24 hour deadline expires. Snake's promise of revenge on Hauk is timeless.

Hauk is played by Lee Van Cleff, well known for starring in Westerns which is appropriate really because generically this is in many ways a Western. It's very much lone gunman, civilisation versus wilderness stuff. Lee Van Cleff doesn't really play Hauk as a villain, nor does he play him as particularly sympathetic. He simply plays him as a pragmatist who knows what his job is. He's very shrewd when it comes to Snake and knows how to manipulate his co-operation.

Isaac Hayes (long before he was singing rude songs to the kids of South Park) plays the Duke, the crime lord of New York. Always donning shades, stoic, shrewd and cold as ice. In many ways Isaac Hayes is here to fulfill the iconography of the 70's Blaxploitation films like Shaft (a classic little film btw). In some ways, the Duke does come across ever so slightly as a leader who does sincerely deliver on the promises to his people. But for the purposes of this film he is the villain, who torments his prize hostage, the President, not so much out of sadism but out of art, and sees Snake as the kind of worthy foe he'd like to go against in a one-on-one fight. But he also sees Snake as his trophy, hoping to cut off his head and use it as the ulitmate bling accessory on his sparkling limo.

Donald Pleasance is of course a familiar face from John Carpenter's films. What I remember him best for is the scene in Hallowe'en where he monologues about his years of trying to reach the soul and rationale of psychopath Mike Myers, only to find nothing there but pure evil. He doesn't quite get such memorable scenes here, but still puts everything into his performance. He basically plays the President as a victim, as a once important man stripped of dignity and proved to have no real backbone when it comes to the crunch. For the most part he is sympathetic though, and Donald's performance during the disarmingly naturalist torture scenes is so authentic in the way he conveys real duress and panic. As such when we get to the climax, we're rooting him on and punching the air when he finally gets his satisfying comeuppance on the bad guys. But then at the end of the film it is made clear that the experience has made him more selfish and his eloquent sentiments are proved to be hollow spin, leaving Snake wondering if he was worth the trouble and the human cost to rescue.

So perhaps this is a good point to discuss the moral message and politics of the film. Because on iconography alone this film is clearly aiming to conjure the feel of both Blaxploitation cinema and the Planet of the Apes movies, which were extremely radical (though incidentally both became progressively more mean spirited). The 70's and very early 80's were an unusual time for cinema, morally and politically speaking. There was such disillusionment in the American government, and not just from a left-wing perspective, but from the far right as well, that cinema often made heroes out of anarchists and vigilantes who bucked the system and law. Just one look at Snake Plissken suggests on aesthetics alone that he should be the villain, not the hero. Infact just like Blakes' 7, Escape From New York demonstrates how in this political climate, even terrorists could almost.... almost be presented as the good guys.

In many ways the events of 9/11 make this an uncomfortable film to watch. The beginning featuring a hijacked plane being deliberately crashed into a building. Particularly since the president is the only survivor, but the film doesn't actually ask us to care about the personal staff and bodyguards who were killed, as if they were expendable. There's also of course the prominence in this film of the World Trade Center which is used as Snake's landing spot. Although certainly at the time the only subversiveness intended was showing the offices of the World Trade Center turned into graffitti murals.

The martyr hijacker gives her speech about striking a fatal blow at an America turned fascist, into a racist police state. So we're being told that America has come under martial law because of the crime epidemic. We're also being told that a lot of the prisoners sent to New York are political prisoners, or victims of racism in the police and judicial system. Certainly although we meet a lot of prisoners in New York who clearly can't be rehabilitated and deserve the censure from society, the allies that Snake comes across demonstrate the kind of loyalty and nobility makes it clear that some criminals are good people and don't deserve to be placed with brutal thugs and murderers. It does very much champion the underdog against the tyranny of a moralistic society.

Actually I'll retract my point about the film presenting terrorists as heroes. Because actually the film doesn't advocate terrorism at all. It actually makes a major point that nothing terrorists do is going to change the rigid government, and even assassinating the president won't make a difference. It taps into the belief that the president is just a powerless puppet for a hidden ruling elite. And certainly the film shows that the prisoners who hold the president hostage don't get their demands met. No-one is prepared to negotiate with terrorists, proving them to be powerless to change anything with their senseless violence.

The martyr also made a point about American imperialism. The film proscribes a future where the Cold War errupted into the real deal. With Snake of course being one of its disillusioned ex-soldiers. In a way the fact Snake's leading of the other prisoners he allied hiself with in the quest to rescue the President, is presented as a little war where good men died for what they believed was a noble cause. Having said that, in the scene at the end where Snake scorns the president because of his hollow sentiments about the many friends of Snake who got killed helping them to escape, it does ring as being deeply hypocritical since it was actually Snake who coerced many of his allies to help him at gunpoint.

But it's not really an intellectual film about the Cold War, it's not making a political argument, it's simply making a statement of a mood of being utterly sick of the Cold War rhetoric, of being fed up of the same old lies and fearmongering about the threat of the end of our civilisation. Snake is told that his mission to save the President is one of national security, and the only way to keep the peace with the Russians, but Snake doesn't care. He's heard it all before. Snake represents that weary apathy about Americanist Cold War jingo and articulates it perfectly. It's like Sting once sung about the Cold War in his classic song, Russians "There's no such thing as a winnable war/it's a lie we don't believe anymore"

Anyhow, the film begins with an instantly hummable military march synth theme (John Carpenter was always good at producing film themes that had a real hook). Then we quickly move to crisis point as the terrorist hijackers crash the President's plane in New York. Hauk and his security forces move in with a large crack team, but an unarmed freakish (ambigously gay) messenger brings them a finger and a list of prisoner's demands on pain of the captured president's execution. It sends the crack squad packing. From that point on, it's a compelling and strangely addictive viewing.

It's not in any way an aesthetically pleasing viewing, it's a sunless, dark and ugly film to watch. But then again that's part of its appeal. It's stark and apocalyptic and has an icy coolness to it. Plus it really captures the surreal, eerie deserted atmosphere of an abandoned New York, with chilly winds and periods of haunting silence. There a great tense action sequence where the stale floorboards (nice image of decay and human vermin there) are tore open by burrowing underground savage crazies dragging Snake's companion down and chasing him at lightening speed, and so to is the scene where Snake and his allies end up driving through a no go zone of crazies territory, marked by various heads on poles, and the crazies mob their car like a pack of cheetahs.

But apart from that the action tends to lack impact or intensity, and at times the action is quite dull and predictable, such as when Snake is put in the ring against a Gladiator. And of course the whole 24 hour deadline with which Snake conspires with other prisoners to find out where the President is, reaches his prize, gets captured, has a concussion induced nap, and then navigates his way across a minefield to homeland does stretch credibility, which is annoying because the writers could easily have made it a 48 hour window instead, or even a 30 hour window would have been more plausible. There's many levels on which I can tear the film apart.

I can certainly recommend better takes on the film's concept. I can think of the 80's Anime series Dirty Pair as a better example of anarchists recruited by the futuristic government to cross some apocalyptic city that's become a cesspool of crime and savagery. Its funnier, sexier, the action's more intense and there's a zest for life about it that this film really lacks.

Also for a film that takes the concept of a hero fighting for survival, trying to escape an evacuated New York that's under siege from unstoppable mutants, then Cloverfield is certainly a much more thrilling, and poignant film, and indeed much more cinematic. Then again on the converse, a film like Resident Evil: Apocalypse that deals with the same situation but as an incoherent mess of sound and fury, makes this film look like a masterpiece by comparison.

But the fact is that I still do enjoy this film. In some ways the measure of a film's enjoyment is how much fun it seemed to be to make, and it really does seem like everyone has had fun with this. Kurt Russell is clearly getting a real kick out of playing a law unto himself like Snake. And John Carpenter clearly must have been enjoying this exercise in turning a landmark city into a ruins. He's building a whole world of eccentric characters. The prison world of New York is one where we are shown real ingenuity and resourcefulness in the way people fashion their cars and tools with leftover chandeliers, and there's a great culture to it all. Such as when Snake walks into a stage musical where prisoners are singing badly timed, badly pitched honky tonk songs ode to anarchy and 'everyone's coming to New York', it's people creating their own amateur art from the ruins and bad times around them. And it's nicely reminiscent of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, films with real personality, extravagant fashions and a carnival of outrageous characters. It's a fun film, even though no-one smiles, it's kind of po-faced in a comical, ironic way.

It's a film best watched on a lonely night in when there's nothing to do, or when you;re feeling sleepless. There's something nicely calming about this film. On the very essence of the film, I find it feelgood. To see a defiant rebel wade through hell, face many dangers with bravery, bear wounds and still come out from this maintaining his stoicism is always something comforting when I'm feeling down or put upon. But best of all is the moment where Snake gets the last laugh, even though he maintains his perpetual sour expression. It's a great witty moment of comeuppance, such a cool practical joke and Snake doesn't know and doesn't give a damn what's going to go down on the international situation because of it. If only they hadn't gone and done that sequel, it could have been perfect in its ambiguity, and it was so well in tune with the times too.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age